GradeSaver has ClassicNotes on Siegfried Sassoon's most important poems, including "Attack," "The Death Bed," "Base Details," "The Rear-Guard," and "Suicide in the Trenches"
Though remembered mostly for his war poetry published between 1917 and 1920, Sassoon's writing spanned well beyond this period. His early, privately published work centers on music, nature, and romance, as exemplified in collections such as Twelve Sonnets (1911), Melodies (1912), An Ode for Music (1912), and Hyacinth (1912). Best characterized as Georgian verse, these lyrical and formally conservative poems are ingrained with an appreciation for the English countryside, as well as a concern with pleasure. These works are often adorned with details about shepherds and pastoral paraphernalia. Sassoon's preference for the sonnet is clear—three of these pre-war collections contained the word "Sonnets" in the title. Some classical references are also made: for example, dryads move through dark woods in "Dryads," and Orpheus sings praises to the natural world in the play Orpheus in Diloeryum. Though religion would not become a serious topic in Sassoon's writing until much later in life, he did dabble with some religious imagery. In "An Ode For Music," he calls upon "Angels of God and multitudes of Heaven" to influence him. Critics generally dismiss these pre-war efforts as insubstantial fluff, but threads from this early writing practice (such as formal concerns and the focus on nature) would appear later in Sassoon's poetic accounts of the war.
Satire was another genre that Sassoon engaged with early on; experiencing the war would later hone this skill. His first attempt was Orpheus in Diloeryum, which he referred to as "an unactable one-act play which had never quite made up its mind whether to be satirical or serious." The Daffodil Murderer was more successful. Published under the pseudonym Saul Klain, this book parodied John Masefield's narrative poem "The Everlasting Mercy" and helped Sassoon develop his literary voice. In The Weald of Youth, Sassoon describes the process of writing The Daffodil Murderer: "I had found a new pair of poetic legs." The book would indeed become Sassoon's first published success, marking a step towards the acclaim that awaited him.
World War I proved to be a turning point for Sassoon's writing career. When the war broke out, Sassoon was afflicted by the patriotic fervor that gripped the nation. Some referred to World War I as "The Great War," a term that encompasses its scale as well as the moral imperative put forth by the Allies to prevent German militarism. This imperative became embedded in public consciousness through the use of propaganda that demonized the enemy, encouraged all men to enlist in the army, and mobilized women to support the troops and fill in roles vacated by soldiers. Prior to Sassoon's disillusionment, he wrote lines such as "War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise, / And fighting for our freedom, we are free" ("Absolution"). In 2004, an unpublished poem of Sassoon's was discovered that exhibits this same gung-ho sentiment; one line reads, "The agony of wounds shall make us clean" ("Because We Are Going"). Within a year of actually fighting in the war, however, Sassoon's notions about honor and purity would transform into rage and disgust.
Sassoon's first collection of war poems was published in 1917, entitled The Old Huntsman and Other Poems. The earnest and pro-war poem "Absolution" is the second poem in the collection, but the works that follow begin to exhibit Sassoon's change of heart. For example, "They" details the way that war kills and mutilates soldiers for a supposedly "just cause." Sassoon's use of colloquialisms is a departure from the elevated language of his pre-war poetry. The most prominent example of this is the pattern of characters that are given regular names in the poems of this collection, such as Davies, Willie, and Gwen in "In the Pink." Nature still plays a vital role in The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, but now it is tinged by the war. The speaker bids strength from trees, streams, and the sky in "Before the Battle," and a dying soldier listens to the sound of rain "slowly washing life away" outside a military ward in "The Death-Bed." The war is terrible, but it is still treated somewhat as "a joke" in comparison to the collections that would follow ("A Letter Home").
Published in 1918, Counter-Attack and Other Poems is Sassoon's second collection of war poetry. In comparison to the poems in The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, where the speakers often turn to beauty and nature in the hope of salvation, the bitter violence at the heart of this new collection displays Sassoon's anger towards the military establishment and compassion towards his fellow soldiers. Muddy trenches, suicide, rotting corpses, and incompetent generals fill the lines of these poems. Sassoon leans heavily on satire, such as when he asks if it will matter for a soldier to lose a leg or eyesight, because "no one will worry a bit" ("Does It Matter?"). According to the English writer Robert Nichols, "Indignation chokes and strangles [Sassoon]. He claws often enough at unsatisfactory words, dislocates his sentences, tumbles out his images as if he would pulp the makers of war beneath them." Some readers protested that the images in Counter-Attack and Other Poems were too gory and violent, while others praised Sassoon for his brutal realism. Though he tried to distance himself from these war poems in later years, it is precisely these poems that secured Sassoon's literary legacy.
After the war, Sassoon worked with other genres, including autobiographical novels, memoirs, and biographies. A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement stated that Sassoon wrote his biography of the Victorian poet George Meredith with "a poet’s estimate, considered with intensity of insight." Sassoon himself thought he would be remembered first and foremost for his devotional poetry, and secondly for his memoirs, but this turned out not to be the case. A burgeoning faith can be detected in earlier poems such as "A Mystic As a Soldier," but the bulk of Sassoon's devotional poetry was written after the war. The spiritual poems in the collection Sequences (1956) received mixed reviews, which may be partly due to the fact that after the barbarity of the war, many people lost their faith and rejected Christianity. Regardless, Sassoon converted to Catholicism in 1957, and continued writing and practicing his faith until his death a decade later. He remains known as an important World War I poet whose themes of outrage, despair, and futility marked a changing world.
